Things I Like
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As I’ve written before on this subject, people just aren’t meant to talk to one another this much. They shouldn’t have that much to say, they shouldn’t expect to receive such a large audience for that expression, and they shouldn’t suppose a right to comment or rejoinder for every thought or notion either. From being asked to review every product you buy to believing that every tweet or Instagram image warrants likes or comments or follows, social media produced a positively unhinged, sociopathic rendition of human sociality. That’s no surprise, I guess, given that the model was forged in the fires of Big Tech companies such as Facebook, where sociopathy is a design philosophy.
This short article sums up a lot of history about how we got where we are with social media, but it also does a great job of pointing out the inherit problems with it. We aren't meant to live life this way, it's not good for us, so maybe the beginning of the end of Twitter could point us to better ways instead of finding replacements.
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At this stage in my life, I simply do not have the time or energy to shake my little pan in a stream of information, trying to sift out the nuggets I want to engage with.
I'm with Rach Smith here and I'm not going to another social network now that the bird seems to be thrashing and possibly in the last throws of life. But I'm here, right on this site, and, for those so inclined, I'm really good at and like email, my contact form is always available to start a conversation.
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Many people don’t want to quit because they worry: without my Twitter account, who will listen to me? In what way will I matter to the world beyond my apartment, my office, my family? I believe these hesitations reveal something totally unrelated to Twitter, and if you find yourself fretting in this way, I will gently suggest that it’s worth questing a bit to discover what you’re really worried about.
Some interesting thoughts in this list.
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This is about more than naps. Thank you for saying that. I say it so much - it is about way more - it's a paradigm shift. It's mind-altering. It's culture-shifting. It's a full-on politics of refusal. We have been brainwashed by this system to believe these things about rest, about our bodies, about our worth - this violent culture that wants to see us working 24 hours a day, that doesn't view us as a human being, but instead views our divine bodies as a machine.
I want to read Hersey's book, but this is a great introduction to her thinking about rest as resistance and so much more. Our culture, and capitalism in particular, drive us to think that rest is bad. It's taken me years to move towards a place where I slow down regularly and I realize that it's a privilege that I can do that, but we all need it so much. In addition I really enjoyed the way Hersey talked about certain activities as being rest inducing, that you can be doing something that is restful for you even as you move. For me walking and knitting and yoga are these things.
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What motivates us to act is a sense of possibility within uncertainty – that the outcome is not yet fully determined and our actions may matter in shaping it. This is all that hope is, and we are all teeming with it, all the time, in small ways.
I've learned so much reading Solnit's writing on hope and this piece is no different. The despairing among us are defeatist, but there are reasons to hope and if you're willing to look, you can see them. Note: this is paywalled, but I was able to read it by using Pocket and I think you can get at least one article free before the paywall goes up.
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The categories of “technical” and “non-technical” serve wholly to privilege those in the former, at the expense of the latter. But literally no product organization would survive a week without the deep—and, I’d argue, technical—expertise of the people who are usually lumped into the “non” bucket: a bucket that includes knowledge of financial systems, laws, business models, operations, ethics, research tactics, user behavior, cultural patterns, learning development, communication practices, organizational psychology, and so much more than could ever be listed in a single paragraph. The “non-technical” nomenclature not only does a disservice to that work—and to those people—it also diminishes the ability of the organization to really get the most benefit from those skills.
A reminder that no one is less than in an organization and we need to remember that in how we talk about the work folks do, it takes skill to do all the jobs needed to keep places going.
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Unyoking your love from your job—fundamentally an economic transaction—frees up your energy to put work into your relationships and your community, inside the workplace and out. It also, crucially, frees you up to put work into loving and caring for yourself, and pursuing the things that make you more of who you are.
This entire essay is wonderful and I'll be rereading it and thinking about it in the days to come.
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When a phrase takes off, it's often because the new words fill a space of uncertainty, like the coining of a new diagnosis. A lot of workers are seeking an efficient way to describe the colliding pressures of wanting to be financially secure, but not wanting to let work take over their life, but also having major status anxiety, but also experiencing guilt about that status anxiety, and sometimes feeling like gunning for that promotion, and sometimes feeling like quitting, and sometimes feeling like crawling into a sensory deprivation tank to make all those other anxieties shut up for a moment. If quiet quitting is fake, the popularity of anti-work neologisms is its own data point that deserves to be taken seriously as a cultural phenomenon.
How often the media writes about things that aren't really happening, but the phrase is born and beaten to death. Related: it's ok to have a job and just work your job and to move up the ladder so you can use your energy for things you like to do outside of work. It doesn't mean you don't do a good job, it merely means you have boundaries. That's been my way of working for years.
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LinkedIn’s new posting culture feels like a signal to workers on how to behave online: be personable and even personal, but don’t rock the boat—always be on guard, to remain in your employer’s good graces. In that way, it seems like corporate culture is influencing our behaviour and conversations online, further blurring the boundary between our personal and professional identities.
I don't use LinkedIn much, but found this article interesting. It seems LinkedIn is actively encouraging a lot of posting (no surprise there) and now people are doing it and also looking at how they can make money and be LI Influencers (so much ugh at that phrase).
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But here’s the big difference I’ve seen over the last few years in the people I work with: They don’t have a big relationship to their hands. I’ve had to show them how to cut a circle out of paper.
I really like Barry's books and this interview once again made me wish I could take her course at Madison.
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It may be the case that many personal infirmities can only be fully repaired in a repaired world, but this does not obviate the need to pull ourselves together as best we can in this broken one. Any serious attempt to topple capitalism would require more discipline, more courage, more endurance, more capability, not less.
I enjoyed this counter argument to a lot of the writing I've read about burn out and the way in which the world is difficult to live in right now. But I do agree with the author that change will only come by folks working towards it and that for many of us (I realize not all of us) we have some power and control over how we organize our lives.
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Really what I was pointing out was that we have to stop playing the short-term game of just cheerleading on our firefighters as they fight these impossible battles, and die, while not addressing the root cause which is, we need to be proactive about managing fuels on the landscape. So, my plea to Rachel was to be truthful with the public, to be honest about these trade-offs, to not treat every fire suppressed as this major victory, and to really start to be culpable. That fuel accumulation that we have out there on the ground is the responsibility of the state and federal fire management agencies who strictly focus their efforts on fire suppression and fire exclusion, and they don't get their offense on the field in off-season to any meaningful degree to deal with the fuels problem.
I've been reading and listening to a lot of podcasts over the past few years about fire and our forrests and the point above is one that keeps coming up over and over again. We aren't approaching managing our forrests correctly or telling the truth to the people who live near or in them and until we do, the fires will keep burning hotter and more out of control.
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But if we are concerned about land abuse, we have begun a profound work of economic criticism. Study of the history of land use (and any local history will do) informs us that we have had for a long time an economy that thrives by undermining its own foundations. Industrialism, which is the name of our economy, and which is now virtually the only economy of the world, has been from its beginnings in a state of riot. It is based squarely upon the principle of violence toward everything on which it depends, and it has not mattered whether the form of industrialism was communist or capitalist or whatever; the violence toward nature, human communities, traditional agricultures, local economies has been constant. The bad news is coming in, literally, from all over the world. Can such an economy be fixed without being radically changed? I don’t think it can.
More Wendell Berry, but this is one of his non fiction rants (at least I think of certain pieces of his that way) and even if I don't agree with everything he says, he always makes me think about things. I do believe we need radical change in many areas to care for the planet and ourselves.
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We live in an era that has been profoundly warped by the headstrong impulses of men who are technically sophisticated but emotionally immature. From the whoopie-cushion antics of Elon Musk to the Panglossian implacability of Mark Zuckerberg, a particular personality profile dominates these times: the boy emperor. While reporting this article, I often wondered how the C.I.A. could have missed the obvious combustibility of this profile when it hired Schulte and gave him a security clearance.
This is a bizarre story that is told so well and written so well, Patrick Radden Keefe is one of my favorite non fiction writers at the moment.
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When a ritual is written out or explained, the activity can seem overly simplistic or fruitless to outsiders. The best way to understand a ritual, according to practitioners, is to engage with it, even if that participation is limited to empathy.
I'm a huge fan of Mason Curry and was glad to see him included in this article, but I also really enjoyed the other perspectives and I love the idea of ritual over routine.